Receiving the pack and starting out

When my pack first arrived at work I was so excited and couldn't wait to get home and open it all up.

I tried to be logical and read through all the handbooks in order but I got side tracked by the textbook and coursework folder. When I did start looking through the units and projects, I suddenly felt daunted at the work that was needed.

I hadn't envisaged how much would be required for each unit. Just part of Unit 2 is to read Chapter 4 of the textbook which is over 100 pages long, and to make 'concise' notes on this and actually take it all in seemed a mission of it's own.

I had planned to set aside every Monday evening for studying but quickly realised that the OCA's guidelines of 1 unit per week wasn't going to be realistic for me. So far I'm working on approx 2-3 weeks for each unit, although Christmas didn't help!

The next thing to puzzle me was the notebooks, sketch books and learning logs. I couldn't get my head around the key role and purpose for each book, how to format them and what to put in them. The handbook seemed to overlap the purposes and didn't seem very clear. I think that the wealth of options and free-choice was actually too much for me. I know this course is very much self-led but I do like to be set off in the right direction to begin with.

To start with I just collected everything into a pile to see how much I accumulated and in what formats. I've finally decided to use them as follows:

Learning Log - online blog reporting on trips, reviews, general thoughts and reflections

A5 Notebook - for everyday notes, planning trips, research notes, film notes

A4 Sketchbook - annotations, general sketches, scrapbook for trip mementos, leaflets, photos, cuttings etc

I've then created a separate folder in my PC documents just for course work and typed up pieces.

The course folder had a summary of visits to do throughout the course. I've been super efficient and expanded this list into a summary of what's needed in terms of annotations, postcard collections, chapters to read and films to watch. Hopefully this will help me to plan ahead and be more time efficient.

Since doing the summary, and having worked out an idea of how long to allow for units, I have added dates that I would like to have the first few units and assignment done by (mid March) and even made a note of what parts of the unit to do each week. This nicely ties in to one of the requirements of Unit 1, planning ahead.

The final thing I wasn't sure about was the collecting of postcards. I'm happy to buy postcards but really struggled to find anywhere online to buy them from. A Google search and looking on museum/gallery websites only seemed to bring up packs of cards rather than individual ones, and I haven't yet found a website with an extensive collection. I did find a forum thread on the OCA website about this and someone suggested I don't take 'postcard' as a literal requirement. I could possibly use internet images and print them off in postcard size. I've started to collect these and save them as a word doc for each unit with a summary of which website I found them on and details of the image.

I do however, quite like the idea of actual postcards and as I'm hoping to make a trip to London in the next few weeks, I will take a list with me and see what I can find.